Why the US Political System Is Unable to React to Peak Oil: Institutions
Posted by Prof. Goose on February 16, 2006 - 11:39am
Topic: Policy/Politics
Tags: hubbert peak, institutions, oil, peak oil, united states [list all tags]
I thought I would bring some pieces of the political puzzle together into a post on why I believe the US, at least at the federal level, will be overly slow to react to the problems of peak oil in both the short and long term. This is the first piece in a series of a few, the first has to do with the institutions of American government. More of my argument under the fold...
These politicians, once holding power, play the political game inside a set of institutions. These institutions are basically sets of rules and norms that produce public policy, the outputs of government.
It is important to understand that only those politicians in "safe" districts (where the MoC (Member of Congress) gets a large percentage (usually defined as over 55%) of the vote (an increasingly common occurence with the use of GIS tools to draw lines come redistricting time) with no ambitions for higher office take real political risks and try to change the system (e.g., Roscoe Bartlett, but this is even more true of safe members of the party out of power).
The institutions (and the rules governing the "game" of politics) of the United States incentivize this behavior, because they were designed from the founding of the country to be deliberative and slow, if not glacial; they were designed to do all they can to perpetuate the status quo. I think understanding the American government's response to peak oil or any crisis requires an understanding of the theory behind the institutions, an analysis of why they are they way they are and what it will take for them to actually change.
Remember that the US does not have a "social" (like many in Europe) democracy, we have a "liberal" democracy. Part of why this distinction exists has to do with institutions (two party/separation of powers/presidential system) that are set up to not be at all reactive but overly slow to change and deliberative.
Separation of powers is an important component that you have heard of many times, I am sure. What it means is that power in America is distributed across many actors or sets of actors, and those actors often hold responsibilities and interests set in opposition by the rules of the game. The president's roles and constituencies in our politics are quite different from those of Congress or the courts; even though we can say that the Republican Party has basic control of the three branches of government, they do not march in lockstep; this will especially be the case if there are electoral gains made by the Democrats in 2006.
Take Britain for example, which has a "responsible party" socially democratic government with a different set of rules and institutions. The Labour Party holds power there. The prime minister, Tony Blair, (caveat: there's more to this story, but this is the simple explanation.) was elected by his party to be the prime minister of parliament, not by the populace like in our system.
The party's ability to be "responsible" (staying on the same page legislatively) is even more important in the British case; for instance, if the Labour Party ever actually loses an important (called a "party" vote) parliamentary vote, then elections would usually not be far behind. This can happen in many parliamentary systems quite quickly.
Still the point is that executive and legislative power are more consolidated in Britain than in the US, meaning that there is more incentive for the sides to maintain "responsibility" and stay on the same partisan page.
Let's say we lived in a parliamentary/social democracy here in the US, pretending the rules of the game were different. Let's also imagine that tne party is in control of (responsible for) government and policy and it screws up. With recent salient circumstances in the US, we could see how new elections could have been called countless numbers of times over the past few years and a change of leadership would have resulted. Instead, here in the US, we have a predictable election cycle that allows for manipulation of resources and "the game," which allows those in office to maintain office; we call this the "incumbency" advantage. (Let's also be clear, this is not an anti-Bush rant, the same thing could have happened in 1978 or 1994, where power would have changed hand completely between the party in power and the out-party...the point is that change could/should have happened and did not).
Also, over 93% of incumbents in the House win reelection with a little lower proportion in the Senate, meaning new people with new ideas rarely make into the legislature, let alone hold positions of power.
here's wikis on presidential and parliamentary systems for contrast:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary
The other part of the equation that people need to understand is that our two party system is part of the problem and is likely to never change. For the most part, that too is constructed because of the way our institutions are set up, because many of our elections only have one winner (as opposed to a parliamentary system, where if you get a percentage of the vote, you are assured representation), therefore it incentivizes third, fourth, and fifth place actors, if they want power, to work with the loser of the election...over time that sorts itself out into the ideologically coherent, but polarized party system that we have presently. Here's a wiki with more on why we have a two party system...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_party_system
Uncommon, unconventional ideas and ideologies remain non-influential, so policies and governments do not change rapidly. (Others dispute whether such innate conservatism provides advantages. While smaller parties find this exceptionally frustrating, proponents of the two-party system suggest that it enhances stability while eventually allowing for ideas that gain favor to become politically influential.)(These systems all turn out this way because of Duverger's Law (my field's only "law"...and it ain't really a law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law)
In my courses, I often describe the social democracy/parliamentary system as an ideological speedboat, it can react, zigging and zagging back and forth quickly, but it can also flip over and kill you.
I describe the our presidential/two party/first past the post system as a very very large cruise ship. It is overly stable.
However, I think we also all have heard of the event/seen the movie where the crewman saw the iceberg, threw the wheel hard over, and the ship didn't turn in time.
Simply put, both systems have weaknesses, but one is more responsive than the other.
In better words, my point is that those same institutions that have maintained the stability of the United States over the times of plenty are exactly the institutions that will keep us from reacting, as a country, in time to avoid most catastrophes. The federal systems are not designed to be proactive, as at the founding of the country, that's not what they wanted. At least that's my feel for it.
This is why most of the efforts to react to peak oil are occurring at local levels of government (e.g., relocalization movements, etc.) or from the grass roots. However, those groups rarely have the power to shift resources or incentivize behaviors to the scale that the federal government could, if it would just react.
We need to reorganize our political culture at the federal level; but in order to do that, we would need a new Constitution, a new set of rules, but that would require a public outcry or political instability heretofore unseen in the US, as well as a lot of time to implement.
As I said somewhere else already today, I didn't see anyone outside with a sandwich board today clamoring for change...so obviously, we ain't there yet.
In my next post on this, I will discuss another set of actors, the linkages between the mass politic and these institutions that further clog the system of change and maintain the status quo.
(some of this piece comes from the comments I made in the Tuesday open thread, but I've refined it a bit)
Also, as with global warming, doubt persists, manufactured or otherwise. Most people will avoid a hard task if they are uncertain of the benefit. Self-interested actors need only promote uncertainty to stall action.
The veneer of "solutions" will work until gas prices reach some tipping point. Then people will ask why ethanol, hydrogen, hybrid credits, (the list is growing) don't fix things "NOW."
The cost problem hurting the general public can only be solved with more efficient cars, plug in hybrids and much less driving. Much less driving is much easier if people live in urban areas or if they have good social contacts with their neighbours. I hope my next short local newspaper article gets the title "The car is dead, long live the car" if I get it published.
The line about european style governments being able to zig and zag between obstacles and also flip over and kill you was a very good one
The Swedish "constitution" depends on the state being an benign power. The only thing stopping it from flipping over is tradition and probably that our country is quite small. There is hardly room for our politicians to become completely disconnected from the rest of the people. If they would make a complete mess they can not retire in isolation within the country but have to live with their decisions. This might have helped making it possible to sneak in non party line ideas now and then since they obviously are good ideas. Few things seems to hurt good ideas as much as making them into ideological principles or rejecting them out of ideological principles instead of cold rational analysis.
On the other hand can cold rational analysis give rise to very dumb decisions if the world view is too limited. I think we were first in the world with instituting a race-biological-institute in 1921 to analyze and prepair optimization of the Swedish race. Flipping over indeed... It led to a sterilization program for mentally retarded, economically weak people like gypsies and difficult people like hysterical what wold now be called feminists, no Jews as far as I know. In Germany the same thoughts led to death camps.
This is one of my reference points when thinking about people talking about a cull of the human race, adjusting the population to fit the resources and so on. Such ideas are deeply disturbing. Things can go to hell in ways that kills lots of unlycky or in some ways weak people but wishing for it is not sound and helping it happen in the "right" way is a way to cold evilness.
I think we are in a trap, with a lifestyle that will be maintained simply until people cannot pretend any longer.
To build a real lifeboat is a considerable task, even if you have all the tools, materials and knowhow. Rafts are quick and easy--not as good as a lifeboat, but note that had the Titanic been equipped with the cheap kind of rafts that U.S. warships carried in World War II (Balsa wood with canvas or tape around it--had one as a kid--very cheap, unsinkable and would not capsize unless waves were driven by winds in excess of about 80 knots. Had lattice bottom so your feet were always wet, but the sharks could not get you.) By analogy, we need something quick, easy, cheap, possible to create quickly in large numbers, something effective, not necessarily something efficient or elegant.
Any ideas?
And please, no monasteries. They are no fun.
A social movement for car sharing and other local cooperation. In USA you can benefit from your religious traditions in starting such movements.
Move your capital to companies that provide post peak oil usefull products. Preferably local companies whose workers you can have a personal relation with.
Dont stockpile gold and guns, stockpile roofing material, cloth, usefull stuff that is too bulky to steal withouth a truck.
Invest in making friends.
Sweden, its a raft compared to the world population. My focus is trying to make it a little better and to be generally usefull.
With a network of friends and neighbors, with a community we can live and thrive. Without these, forget hoarding food or guns or anything at all. Hint: For security and self defense, make friends with veterans and active-duty soldiers, sailors, and Marines.
From fairly well managed countries and states to regions with significant hydro power and nuclear power to towns with good peak oil infrastructure to cooperating small size companies to cooperating neighbours to fairly self sufficient families.
Preferably organized in different ways to give better redundancy and competition that inspiers others via the net and the market. Then it will not hurt as much if some of them fails and others can learn from their failures.
There is no optimal solution. Therie is no golden road. The best I can think of is to on manny levels have social processes for finding better solutions all kinds of problems.
Try to run one within 800 m, a half mile of everyone in an urban area.
Minimalistic, but useful.
Also, the electric trolly buses I've ridden on in San Francisco seem nice and quiet and of course free of fumes . . . and reliable.
Would you like to run for president on the Electric Party ticket?
"Let's electrify transportation."
"Electrify now!"
"If elected, we shall electrify you within four years."
While they are getting old, and are due for an upgrade before the Olympics in 2010, they definitely serve their purpose well, and who knows how much smog and money (due to very low electricity rates in BC) they've saved the tax payer over that period.
Ditto here, but I was going to add a comment about the Wisdom of the Crowds.
A two-party (first horse takes the race) system assumes that it is being driven by the wisdom of the majority. But what if it is being driven by the childishness and greed of the mob? (Or worse yet by the heartless greed of the profit-gobbling corporate machine?)
I'm sure I'm not the first to ponder over this question The great philosophers (Socrates? --I was not a philo major) gave voice to the question of what governance system is best --democracy or the benevolent scholar king?
My belief is that the very success of certain technologies has created an invisible machine (not an invisible hand) whose inherent need for profit and "growth" is driving us towards the edge of the ledge. Our current political system has no ability to grab hold of the steering wheel and to guide the machine away from its mad destiny.
(I won't trust my own judgement on this, because I might just be a scientist who wants POWER DA*N IT!)
I've heard that areodynamic shells make a big difference for pick-ups. There's a huge market ... and at $3-4/gal the market will be nuts for them.
(All this will be (current best-guess) at the edges though, with lifestyle changes at center stage.)
I do agree that lifestyle changes are center stage, and have focused most of my efforts in this direction. As Ghandi said, be the change you want in the world.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060216/BUSINESS01/602160561
GM ... they made their bed.
1. The rational ignorance effect
Because the rational voter knows that his one vote is unlikely to decide an election, he has no incentive to invest any resources whatsoever in informing himself. Indeed, the purely rational voter does not vote at all. (BTW, many economists are proud of not voting, because it shows how rational they are. I am not making this up.)
2. The shortsightedness effect
Because the first duty of a politician is to get reelected, all focus has to be on achieving this task. Why? Because it is a race to the bottom, in which integrity and honesty and concern about the future is penalized with failure, while comforting lies and promises get you elected.
3. The special-interest effect, in which the costs of special-interest politics are concealed and spread out, while the benefits of pork barrel politics are concentrated and highly visible.
And, alas, all of these three effects work together.
Query: How do we get a new Constitution without blood in the streets?
Answer: Damnifknow.
IMNSHO, we have a pretty good Constitution already. It would be nice if we had a few more folks in DC who've had a civics class at some point in their lives ...
That said, it probably does need an amendment or two to recognize and counter the effects of corporate bigness-for-bigness'-sake.
There is another point you make: There is a huge gap between ideals and reality. 'Twas ever thus.
The genius of our Founding Fathers was based on the fact that they had all read and studied (or had told to them) the classics--Plato, Plutarch, Aristotle, Locke, just to name the four heaviest hitters in the lineup. Thus they knew exactly what the problems were. They knew democracy would not work, because this had been shown beyond all doubt by both Plato and Aristotle. Thus they tried to build a Republic, cleverly extracting the best parts of both Roman Republic and the British constitional monarchy. They knew monarchy would not work, because as the ancients had noted, the sons of outstanding fathers are often worthless, sometimes depraved and corrupt. They knew plutocracy would not work, for reasons shown rigorously by Aristotle . . . . and so what did they do?
They built a mixed political system, with elements of aristocracy (and originally our Senate was supposed to represent not the wealthy but the aristocratic by blood, though this was never made explicit). To prevent aristocracy becoming too powerful, the Constitution guranteed the right to bear arms: THAT was the real reason. (Though the militia reason is valid, it was secondary in importance.) In England and most European countries only aristocrats could carry swords or (with a few exceptions) ride horses. They agonized over how to restrict the francise and brilliantly came up with the solution of letting each state decide how to set voting eligibility.
Now they were not fools. Jefferson and others knew that slavery was wrong and a time bomb, but there was nothing they could do about it in 1776 because the institution of slavery was so deeply embedded into the culture and social organization of the South.
I have some ideas, but they are longshots, like trying to kill a deer at a thousand yards with open iron sights. As a hunter, I would never take this shot unless my family were starving, because chances are you'll just wound the animal and get no meat.
Even the most brilliant science fiction writers have come up with nothing I find plausible.
And therefore . . . odds on TEOTWAWKI? 50:50
I consider myself to be an optimist.
A worst case would be a FSU-ish collapse, a civil war, and an oil peak. Talk about a perfect storm. Ouch.
> that's exactly the point I am trying to emphasize. small, incremental changes in policy do occur, but large-scale policy change takes a generation if not more.
AND LATER...
> that's my next post that I am putting together on polarization and the causes and evidence of it.
There is an interesting theory that these two subjects may be very related.
Professor Jack Lessinger, who researched the big migrations of Americans within our borders has a theory (very convincing IMO) that the big migrations were driven by polar changes in the Standard American Dream.
Like peak oil, it sounds a little 'out there' when you very first hear of it - but reading the facts behind the theory brings it quickly into the realm of reality, or at least possibility.
Perhaps you'll get a chance to read his book "Schizomania" before you write about the polarization we are seeing in America?
Schizo = split and Mania = his term for the Standard American Dream. Lessinger's 'split' isn't between the political left and right though, it is a split we all are experiencing individually as we struggle with decisions that move us towards the old decaying American Dream or towards the still immature American Dream.
In context of the challenges we are facing it is a very valuable perspective. I'll try to paste in a brief article on it below. Also the links incase I can't paste in the article.
General site: http://www.predicting2020.com/
Archived Article 1:
THE COMING DECLINE OF BIG SPENDING AND THE NEXT AMERICAN DREAM is now at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/schizomania/message/2
Archived Article 2:
THE FIFTH MIGRATION is now at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/schizomania/message/3
Greg in Mo
****
THE COMING DECLINE OF BIG SPENDING AND THE NEXT AMERICAN DREAM
By Jack Lessinger
Credit card in hand, we shop 'til we drop. Keeps the economy humming.
Always has and always will, right? Wrong. The slow sales of Christmas
2002 --"weakest in three decades" (AP) --foreshadow a historic shift
in spending habits. Big Spending as we know it today is an isolated
phenomenon that began after World War II. It ran its course and is
now falling into irrelevance.
In the 19th century, Americans transformed a continent (and created
jobs) by saving and investing in mines, railroads, factories and
cities. They continued to scrimp and save right up to World War II.
Spend good seed capital on a car that doesn't earn a cent of
interest? Nonsense. Buy it on credit and pay interest? Scandalous!
The precious few able to afford more than basic necessities saved and
invested in their golden future --up to 40 percent of their income.
That was the American Dream back then. Save and invest now. Get-it-
all later.
Get-it-all and get it now-today's American Dream-first excited a few
rebellious souls around 1900. The new dream-call it the Little King-
made every consumer a king, a little king. With his little queen, the
new mini-monarch would preside over his mini-kingdom in suburbia.
By the 1920s, ladies in bloomers and bustles metamorphosed into short-
skirted, Charleston-dancing flappers. Black utility Model T's
blossomed into colorful roadsters. Nevertheless, the time-encrusted
injunction to save remained the stronger influence. A dangerous split
was developing. (Economists, failing to see the long-run significance
of that split, predicted continuing prosperity. Certainly through the
1930s!)
By the 1930s, visions of little kingdoms were growing fast, but not
fast enough to rescue the millions of unemployed devastated by the
slowing of demand for more and more basic industry. The new dream
would vastly expand demand (and jobs) for consumer goods-houses,
appliances, cars and later, freeways and malls. But the old dream was
still hale and hearty. The economy was paralyzed by two conflicting
dreams, both equally powerful. (Economists, little inclined to study
dreams, blamed the Great Depression on economic factors -- like the
gold standard or flawed trade policies.)
After World War II, the consumer engine caught on, but sputtered with
many recessions. The old dream was still alive, the new one still
shaky. (Economists debated tax and monetary policies.)
By the 1960s, the tired old dream of a golden future was dead, stone
dead. We had become dedicated spenders. The economy thrummed like a
new Ferrari. Not a single recession interrupted that prosperous
decade. Society and economy were in sync. Marriages soared. Divorces
were rare. Young families crowded into suburbia, the new paradise
designed for consumption spenders. Millions of ranch houses bought
and furnished with borrowed money created jobs galore. (Economists
proudly announced they had at last conquered depression! Only
recessions remained.)
But the 1960s also revealed the Little King's dark under side.
Excess. The frenzy to get-it-all now led inexorably to a whatever-it-
takes madness, a blatant disregard for our common future. Consumption
had become overconsumption. We polluted our air and water, eroded our
land, tainted our food, endangered other species, neglected
education. And we ignored the impoverished, the old, the young and
the crippled. And saving increasingly gave way to borrowing.
The dream had gone from vision to mania. Dangerously out of control,
it led to the need for change. It was the fourth time since 1790 that
an American Dream had become a mania and triggered the next American
Dream.
Since 1960, the Responsible Villager, as I call it, opposes the
Little King in all that it is and does. Growing with explosive
momentum, the Responsible Villager is winning the heart and mind of
America. In 1960, "environment" was just another word. "The
environment" had not yet been born. Only forty years later, Al Gore,
a candidate known for his strong environmental positions won the
popular vote for president. In 1960, what's-in-it-for-me took top
billing. In the outpouring of communal feeling on September 11, 2001
we saw how far we had come to what's-in-it-for-us.
By 1990, responsible self-interest became as compelling as the mania
for irresponsible self-interest. Two opposing manias created a
perilous split I call schizomania. Extreme irresponsibility produced
economic bedlam -- market bubbles, greedy CEOs grabbing ill-gotten
billions, cooked books and relaxed accounting procedures. At the same
time, exemplars of responsible self-interest demanded and are
beginning to win strict regulations.
As the pressure to get-it-all-now comes under increasing attack,
today's mania for consumption spending must subside. A significant
trend toward "down-scaling" has already been observed.
What's next? Since 1790, every depression occurred during an episode
of schizomania. And every episode produced at least one depression.
This does not mean that a depression is now inevitable. It does mean
that until 2020, in addition to continuing decline in consumer
spending, we should expect skittish investors, booms, busts and an
elevated probability of depression. Depression, not recession.
(Jack Lessinger is Professor Emeritus, Business, Government and
Society, School of Business, University of Washington. His latest
book is SCHIZOMANIA: Split Society, Perilous Economy 1990-2020. )
Copyright 2003 by Jack Lessinger
"An election is no time to discuss serious issues."
So, so sadly, maddeningly true.
I agree with the thesis; I think we are able to respond only to current emergencies (forcecasts of 9-11 and Katrina weren't bad enough). Perhaps grass-roots awareness and big-business pressure are two possible drivers of political action. But first SOMEONE needs to open the discussion, make it part of discourse.
I am actually quite pessimistic, because I do not think American culture would accept a "negative" message. The whole American myth and basic principle is progress and freedom to do whatever and expanding opportunity. We would not know where to begin if faced with the need to downscale our dreams and lives. I think of Jared Diamond's COLLAPSE when I consider our culture.
According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore he has a second book on global warming titled "An Inconvenient Truth" coming out this spring.
See:
http://www.participantproductions.com/films/Coming+Soon/191/AnInconvenientTruth
http://festival.sundance.org/filmguide/popup.aspx?film=6556
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/25/AR2006012502230.html
So then, who is our Churchill? The guy we now turn to because he's been out in the wilderness preaching an unpopular message that we didn't want to hear, but now realize we should have listened to before TSHTF? Gore is the only guy I can think of. He's the only major figure in the Democratic party who's established any real credibility on the issue. There will be no Republicans credible on the issue, and Nader is unelectable because he has no track record as anything other than a gadfly (he makes a great gadfly but I have zero confidence that he could run a large organization). Gore, for all his drawbacks, would be the only game in town.
It could well take till 2012, but it's an interesting thought...
Whether it is Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mitt Romney or some other electable official, they will be clamoring for our attention.
For a while I have believed that the best way to make "Green" issues palatable to the SUV-driving soccer-mom Republicans, and the hardhat-wearing F150-driving democratic mine-workers is to wrap them in the flag. Sell it as energy "security." Any of the above mentioned politicians could pull this off.
But not Al Gore. He would only pull Democrats and nobody likes a loser. He's just not a fighter. That's why he lost Florida. He should stick to inventing internets. Alright, I don't like Al Gore, forgive me.
I fear the next president will not be the guy who talks about climate change, but the guy who promises to open up the national parks for drilling.
Bill Clinton was on CSPAN a few months back talking about Global Warming, energy, etc. He tried to explain, but I'm not sure many heard, that the driving force for these issues arises bottom-up rather than top-down. It is the public that decides what is a "voting issue" and what not; and the politicians then respond.
Elsewhere, one political analyst (I forgot her name) was talking about the "Great Public Conversation", meaning the massive sets of conversations that we little people have with one another on a day-to-day basis. Some of the conversations resonate within the massive bottoms and rise up to be heard at the top of the hill while others simply don't ring the bell and are never heard.
The analyst proposed that it is these American-street conversations that drive politics and not the other way around. Good leaders know they better turn around every once in a while and make sure they have a flock of followers. Otherwise they will be marching alone towards the ledge and beyond.
So Stuart, yes in a way you are correct to argue that no politician has a deep commitment to an issue that is not going to swing the vote one way or another. But it is the people who decide through their Great Public Conversations what becomes a "voting issue" and what does not.
So the real question is how to make Peak Oil part of the mainstream conversation rather than part of a supposedly lunatic-fringe conversation.
He probably is much smarter than the reporters, but it's not a idea to let it show. ;-)
Plus, the reporters following the Gore campaign got turkey sandwiches, while those following the Bush campaign got smoked salmon and caviar. Gore just didn't suck up to the press, and that was probably a mistake.
But now, Gore is one of the few Democrats who have not prostituted themselves with the neocon fascists, and by the time 2008 comes around, I suspect there will be a fair amount of nostalgia for the good old days of the 90's. I personally believe that Al Gore would be an excellent president - the things that make for a good campaign are not really the things that make a good president. He has the ability and interest to understand the issues at hand, and I would trust him to make a reasoned and rational decision.
I'm all for re-electing Gore. How refreshing it would be to have people in the White House who can use their minds for more than just scheming, and who are not criminals. Not very high standards, I know, but we will need at lest that given the issues we face.
OTOH, as an Electrical Engineer I have a fairly good understanding of the technology, and I have zero confidence my vote will matter.
Many expected the 2000 election to prove to everyone that every vote counted. IMO, it had the opposite effect. Yes, your vote counts if you're in a "swing" state. But if your state is solidly red or solidly blue, your vote doesn't count.
I am in a very red area of a very blue state. There really is no point in voting. I do it anyway, on principle, but it doesn't matter. The local elections will all be won by the incumbent Republicans, the statewide and national by the Democrats (incumbent and otherwise). There's rarely a local issue that's in question. (The library budget always passes.) Sometimes I wonder if it's worth risking jury duty for this...
Yes. Thanks to Diebold, you probably voted their way after you thought you voted your way. In electrical engineering it's known as the T-type flip flop.
Now, can you see the several fallacies in the above statements that I wrote?
No.
It's all "sound logic" to me.
;-)
"What do you do if the plane falls apart [and you have no parachute]."
Of course the answer I expected was to say your prayers or words to that effect, but Louis just relit his pipe, puffed and paused before he answered:
"You fly the wheel. Maybe the wheel is the only thing left, but you do not know that for sure. Fly the wheel, its all you've got."
In other words, when my toilet does not flush, I do not assume automatically that the chain is disconnected. Maybe the flapper valve is stuck. Maybe the float is leaking. Maybe I can just bend the rod to fix things. On the other hand, what I actually do is take off the lid, look inside, diagnose and fix the problem. What I do not do is shoot my toilet. I'm sort of attached to it, for about two minutes a day, every day;-)
And as far as the plane analogy goes, I don't think the issue is how one reacts when facing a near certain death with no time to react or choices. It's more an issue of continuing to perform actions that are obviously no longer effective. Not voting will have no effect on my survival if my vote is having no effect. As I said - I'm not quite there, if only because it still works on a local level.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/10/06/D8D2IU703.html
Just a few large corporations own a huge majority of the media outlets. They control what we hear, and how it is framed. While it is, in typical Gore fashion, long and involved, reading this speech (and further exploring the issue of the corporatocracy, of which the MSM is the mouthpiece) will shed much light on the discussion in this thread. Our gov't does not work in the interest of nor in response to the 'body politic'. It works in the interest of those with power, influence and money.
. . . and neither will be as determined by the succession and the current holders of those succession positions.
I, for one, am always interested in your thoughts.
Should the VP change before Bush ceases to be president there is the possibility that that VP will become president but I expect Bush to choose as he has done for many of the senior posts in his administration and so the odds are that VP will have to leave with Bush (perhaps after a brief hiatus).
I expect the next president of the US will be chosen by a near unanimous decision of the House and Senate, I also think it is quite likely that the president and VP will be from different parties.
You may be unwise to express interest in my thoughts, one of the 'thems' might wish to lock you up ;)
The original Constitution provides that if neither the President nor Vice President can serve, the Congress shall provide law stating who is next in line. Currently that law exists as 3 USC 19, a section of the U.S. Code. This law was established as part of the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. There, the following line of succession is provided:
Speaker of the House of Representatives
President Pro Tempore of the Senate
Secretary of State
Secretary of the Treasury
Secretary of Defense
Attorney General
Secretary of the Interior
Secretary of Agriculture
Secretary of Commerce
Secretary of Labor
Secretary of Health and Human Services
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
Secretary of Transportation
Secretary of Energy
Secretary of Education
Secretary of Veterans Affairs
Secretary of Homeland Security (not yet set by law)
http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_succ.html
What happened was that the Republicans were in a hysterical, last ditch effort to keep America from rearming for fear that a deficit financed arms buildup (sounds familiar?) would end the depression and Roosevelt and the Democrats would get the credit because they had been trying to do just that for the last eight years.
Then after the primaries but before the convention, Hitler took Western Europe off the map in six weeks. The American people (and the Republican delegates) realised that the only thing standing between the coast and the Nazis was the British navy, and the British government was dominated by appeasionist Tories.
The delegates mutinied and picked Wilkie.
A good example would be if Hillary Clinton went back to the Republican party (she was a Young Republican in college) and was selected in 2008 as their presidential candidate.
Some visions just drive you to drink.
And that one I had never thought of.
I have a pretty good imagination. But.
Horror stories are not my genre.
Later, before he hung himself, he dropped the pieces of silver, and they've never forgiven him.
If the northern and western metrocoastal Republicans revolt because of a housing collapse, the Democratic and Republican party coalition will have 60% of the vote and 75% of the House and Senate. The last time we had a realignment that big was in 1928 to 1932, and for the same reason. When the banks went down they took too many hard working, high savings, middle class Republicans with them. We had social security within four years of the realignment election. They had played by the rules, been cheated out of their retirement, and they just changed the rules to get their retirement back.
A collapse of metrocoastal housing values will flip a lot of voters. And when the dollar renormalizes, housing values will renormalize because too many people will be moving to where the jobs are in the flyover areas like Montana and Alabama.
Our balance of payments deficit was 716 billion last year. That's a lot of jobs that are going to come back.
Look at the Reagan/Ducakus election. The message was 'happy days are here again VS wasteful govenment spending in the past requires sacrifice.
The 'voodoo economics' of Reagon won.
I am sad when I hear these phrases because they seem to portend more suffering, injustice and poverty. At least, that's how it appears to this pinko-commie liberal on this side of the pond. "Patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings"... But, we are all in this together! I don't want to offend anyone, just communicate that there are cultural differences which grate (on both sides, I'm sure).
This is not necessarily bad. There is nothing wrong with these people. I may even be one of them and not know it. This is just the way it is. Here and everywhere else. Those people rioting in the East over cartoons didn't wake up and decide to do that. They do it out of peer pressure and because their leaders instigated it. They are only able to react because they have eyes. They are illiterate - if you wrote out those jokes, they wouldn't understand. I digress.
There is a rainbow of political opinion in the US. Very few people either "hate" or "love" anything.
On the broader topic here: Why the US Political System Is Unable to React to Peak Oil: Institutions.
Of the people, by the people, for the people. Like the Muslims in the East we react to one thing - what we see -in this case, the price of gasoline.
The media now is actually totally hyping the price of energy. You see it everywhere and all the time. This is good and partially the result of "believers" here and elsewhere. Every night the evening news has a story on Iraq and one on some aspect of the "price of oil." On PBS as well as FOX. The "debate" is healthy. As I have said before - our much-maligned President himself has acknowledged the issue in the State of the Union Address. Remember the "yellow-cake-from-Niger" reference of three years ago that got so much flak? Why doesn't Bush's comment on "oil-addiction" draw an equal amount of praise from this clearly left-leaning crowd here? It's politics, and it's unhealthy. It is obviously motivated by a "hatred" of Bush among the same intellectual elite who espouse peak oil. It undermines the movement to change our energy habits. If it was Clinton or Carter who had said this there would have been a party here. Instead, we just had a couple of threads.
To those of you who are about to start spewing anti-establishment, left-wing nonsense, save your breath. I am an independent and non-affiliated with any institution or ideology. I cherish only my freedom.
The notion that this issue is not getting play is ridiculous. It is up to us now to define the important aspects of that issue.
The tone in this thread is negative and defeatist. The bottom line is that the national average price of retail gasoline is $2.26. Sorry Folks, that is not going to cut it. As I have stated numerous times before, this price needs to be $3.50 before anything happens.
Until that price is higher nobody is going to pay any attention to anything you say about peak-anything. I'm sure you all can verify this through personal experience.
I'm sorry Leanan, those statements weren't aimed at anything you said, I got sidetracked.
And I think you're dead wrong on that. Though I agree that might not be a good thing.
It's not 5%. We have become much more polarized than we used to be. I would say about 30% of the American people are in the middle. 30% are hardcore rightwingers, 30%...well, perhaps not hardcore leftwingers, but hardcore anti-rightwingers.
I expect the polarization to grow worse. It is, as Tainter has noted, entirely normal for ideological strife to increase as collapse approaches.
I will stick to my 5% numbers. I'd say another 25% on either end can only be classified as having moderate political motivation.
I just don't see it. If you look at poll numbers where you basically have "leading of the witness" - you might get one impression. But remember those are the people who are motivated or the 30% or whatever on either end to start with. You've already eliminated the middle that I talk about.
Have you ever seen those USA today-type studies that show the percentage of Americans who can't find the US on a map or can't name the vice-president? I always like those and can never figure out why they don't get more attention but to think that it is because we can't look our own obliviousness in the mirror. How can these people possible have a hardcore political opinion.
I'm sure that if I questioned my own family and friends - what I consider(perhaps mistakenly) a generally intelligent and informed group - they would not be able to give a coherent synopsis of the difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Most Americans know Bush is a Republican through constant association. They wouldn't be able to name a Democrat, having forgotten John Kerry. They only understand what a blue or red-state is when it is drilled into them in the week before election day.
Remember the Clinton-campaign slogan, "It's the economy stupid." That's what matters. That's what Americans respond to. If there are jobs and everything seems ok, it doesn't matter whether the leaders are left, right, or center.
It is only the fringes, the "margin," that has any hardcore-ness to it. And that has always been the case.
The right complains that the New York Times is a liberal institution. Anytime you mention something vaguely conservative, you get accused by people in Brazil of watching too much Fox News. The reality is most people don't read newspapers or watch the news. That's because they don't read and if they watch anything it's either porn or reality-TV.
It would be nice to think that 60% of the population is politically-driven, but my everyday experience with my fellow Americans just doesn't show that. I'd be willing to hear more evidence that I'm wrong.
I wish I could say I disagree with you.
Unfortunately you lay out a solid case.
That is so true.
The silent majority is a good 50% of the people who hardly ever vote or get involved. They live their private, self-absorbed lives; and who's to say that their way is so wrong?
Of course, the see no evil, hear no evil and mind your own business route works well for only so much of the long haul.
Eventually some irate outsider is going to smash his 747 fists into our tranquil, two-towered lives even though we personally feel we did nothing wrong. We bought our SUV's and paid with honest money for our gasoline. Why do they hate our freedom? Surely it's not something we did.
Easily. There are a lot of disillusioned people in this country. They care, but they don't think their vote counts. Or they don't think there's a real difference between the two parties.
Again, it's easy. The less you know, the easier it is to be hardcore. People's reactions to, say, Clinton or Bush are visceral, not intellectual.
Oh, yes they would. Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton.
Not really politically-driven (though in a sense, I would say all human activity is to some extent political). More like politically opinionated. They feel strongly.
There are a lot like that in my office. They don't bother to vote, but they spend a lot of time forwarding rightwing talking points via e-mail and working themselves into a frenzy over Hillary Clinton.
FWIW, I would not have "partied" no matter who said the words "oil addiction." If anything, it was more impressive that Bush, of all people said them. But he also backpeddled the very next day, with the White House saying he didn't really mean it.
But if President Gore or President Kerry had given the same speech, I would not have been impressed, either. Talk is cheap. Especially from a politician.
You are 100% correct about the poison of mindless leftism.
For example, W. Bush advocates switchgrass, therefore switchgrass ethanol is stupid, bad, tool of the establishment blah, blah, blah.
Well, having done my homework, I am a huge fan of switchgrass, though on my own property grow jerusalem artichokes, because you can eat those, too.
To post here we must be optimists: Otherwise why not just get in bed with our friend, Jack Daniels?
Well, having done my homework, I am a huge fan of switchgrass, though on my own property grow jerusalem artichokes, because you can eat those, too.
Most of the switchgrass plans I've seen have the grass carted off to some processing plant. And the switchgrass advocates ignore the need to bring the left-over 'waste' material back to the land from where it came.
So, as someone who's "researched" this, show me where there is a small-scale bioreactor that a man could put on 40 acres to provide a fremented slurry to feed his potstill?
if 'switchgrass processing' is like 'soybean oil processing' (where you need 20 (or was it 200) tons of soybeans a day to chemically extract the oil profitablilty), they yea....switchgrass IS a 'tool of the establishment.
But you've researched it... show us an inexpensive unit that 40 acres could feed it raw material and the resuliting output would be profitable in 5 years, therefore making the investement worthwhile.
By your words you have revealed that there is no bottom to your ignorance at 600 fathoms. Deeper than that my line does not go.
There is no answer to bullet-proof invincible ignorance except to ignore it.
Good bye.
The challege is still open to anyone who actully KNOWS what they are talking about - where is the swithcgrass->fuel method that would be profitable in 5 years for a 40 acre farm which allows the post-processed waste to be returned to the land.
Because to date, I've been seeing is alot of hot air from elected officials and their ilk.
Why build for only 40 acres?
But that is not the question at hand - the pro-switchgrass fans are the ones pushing it to make liquid fuel. Toxic liquid, yes. But not toxic like methane is. And liquid fuel != gas fuel.
Right now I can plant sugar beets and obtain food for the yeasts. And I can do that model on 1/2 an acre to 40 or more acres. Plus, I can eat the beets, if I was hungry, can't do that with switchgrass.
Why build for only 40 acres?
Scaleability. In an ideal world, I'd like to see the model work on 5 acres. But if the smallest unit is sized for 40 acres, to service 120 acres, 3 units. If you had 400 acres, one could buy 11 units, thus allowing one unit to be in 'service' mode. Or you could buy 5 units, and STILL have full production if the harvest was bad.
Plus, alot of state tax law change based on the size. 40 acres is one of the 'incremental' units.
Also, remember the amount of solids is very low. The roots stay in the ground for soil remediation (no plowing, of course) so you are only moving the left behind potash and phosphate, not mulch. Nitrates don't make it through the bioreactor so the switchgrass is planted with a nitrogen fixer as an alternate crop, or the nitrate is made from coal. Or the switchgrass is genetically engineered to make it's own nitrate. Sulfur we are getting from China, in the air.
I still prefer coal for synfuels, but then again, I could be wrong.
What happened to the "TOD reaches 10^6" post and all our self-congratulations about how no one engages in ad honimen attacks here?
Sigh. ROFLMAO!
My mom, an immigrant from Germany, is the epitome of optimism - and a strong supporter of GW Bush, Fox News, big tax cuts, etc. After telling me how she used to huddle around the kitchen stove with her siblings during winter, she got very upset with me when I described how my wife and I are essentially living in one heated room of our house saying how negatively we were acting. I was quite shocked, and pointed out the reality of rising NG prices as a motivator, but she wouldn't budge from her optimism that somehow the problem would get solved.
Seriously, I think what we see is the difference between a young country, rich in natural resources and used to expansion, vs. older nations that are have been forced to face their own limits.
There are plenty of pinko-commie liberals on this side of the pond. At this point, we mostly feel like germans in the 1930's, powerless to stop Hitler.
Speaking as an American, I am saddened that you Europeans don't stick this in our face more often. You are way too polite and we Americans don't understand politeness.
Please allow me to translate the American talk that you see on so many of these blog pages.
First you must understand a concept embedded in our culture. It is called "free will". We Americans believe that we cannot be brain washed. It is a fundamentalist feature of our Judaeo-Christian culture that each man (or woman --as if they actually count) is "free" to choose between two clear extremes: good and evil.
You need to watch a lot of Cowboy and Indians movies starring John Wayne to fully understand our culture. John, you see, always wears the white hat and he is always 100% goodness. He rides free on the Open Range. Whosoever chooses to oppose John (well actually, it's in the movie script and they have no real choice) wears a black hat and is evil beyond redemption.
Anyone who opposes John gets blown to kingdom come and we Americans cheer wildly. Are you starting to get the movie picture yet?
We Americans are unable to understand the difference between Hollywood fiction and real reality. Our brains see both as being one and the same. In our movies, America always wins. Therefore the same outcome has to happen in the other world, the one out there beyond the borders of our self-centered skulls. Are you starting to understand yet?
The President of our country is controlled by a Machivellian character named Karl Rove. Karl knows about brain washing. He knows how to send "mixed messages" to the reptilian and sheep-like parts of the American brain. The American brain does not know it is being taken to the cleaners and will deny it if you try to say otherwise. You see, we all have "free will". It can be no other way.
So consider the mixed mesage you posted upstairs: THEY hate OUR freedom.
How does the American mind decode this message?
Well, "THEY" are the evil unAmericans. That's easy. It's always us innocent sheep against them bad wolves.
"Hate" is an ugly emotion that we despise and we get all mad and hateful when anyone brings it up.
"OUR" reminds us that we are an ownership society and we have exclusive rights to all sorts of things.
"Freedom" reminds us that we are like reptiles trapped in a cage. It makes us go wild and crazy if someone (other than our wire-tapping President) threatens our "freedom".
So you see? Our Karl Rove is a brilliant engineer of mind twisting messages.
They make no sense to you Europeans because you have not been programmed since childhood to sing "God Bless America". These short phrases do not stir up your blood and emotions the way they do it to us Americans. "Mission Accomplished" does not remind you that you made it to the Moon in the Apollo Mission and by-golly you will win again through unstoppable Yankee ingenuity.
And as for that "shinning city on the hill", well, there you go again. You never went to church with our cowboy president, Ronald the Righteous, to understand that optmistic dream. It sort of brings Star War tears to us Americans. Anything is possible. Why even an idiot can become President.
God Bless America. (Please.)
Unfortunately history is a slow process and there will be quite a while before we get there... probably not in our lifetime.
Further efforts were "derailed" for lack of funding after this aborted start.
"Light Rail" was born as a lower cost affordable alternative to Rapid Transit (exclusive ROW, usually 3rd rail, high volume). Not as good, but not as expensive.
Miami has finally (2003 ?) funded a restart of their "Subway in the Sky" program with plans to build a 103 mile system within two decades.
SF Bay BART was more a local effort AFAIK.
I am less certain this is what the founding fathers wanted. Here is how I think of it.
They set up the house as a way to get as much imput from the entire population as possible.
The Senate was set up to be more of a brain trust and have a small number of more elite thinkers pushing legislation.
The tension between the house and Senate should capture both prevailing public opinion (House) and rational long term planning (Senate) to deliver good laws and direction. When the population of the country was much smaller this was easier to maintain. The really bright statesmen ended up in the Senate.
I think we have lost these distinctions today. Mostly I think we have lost focus because politics has become a career all on its own. It was suppossed to be a service to the society with individuals rotating in and out. Most career politicians don't know anything but politics and running for office. They spend years working up the system to ever higher office. IMO they are now the least knowledgable people about real world problems; not the most knowledgable with goals to achieve for the good of society.
In the abscence of good legislation the executive and judicial branches just go through the motions without clear direction of where the country is going or how to carry that direction out legally.
the other is that, in a small country, the representative/pragmatic model you spoke of worked very well. no real pressing decisions, small constituencies. But now, each member of the House "represents" over 650k people...
http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Direct_Election_Senators.htm
Also don't forget that the house number was fixed rather than continuously increasing by 1 representative per X thousand people. Each individuals vote has been diminished.
First, the MSM allows people to enter politics at a younger age. Previously you needed to build a reputation as a statesmen over the course of years and decades. Now you need a little buzz and about 6 weeks worth of good sound bites and you can get elected. You also have it extending from a career polition to a family political machine passed on from generation to generation.
Second, they keep living longer. Good ole Strom served how many terms? The combination of longer lives and the ability of technology to extend the working life of a politition allow them to serve longer and longer terms.
A century ago somebody would need to wait longer to get elected, and then because of health be forced out of office sooner. Today both of these ends have been pushed further apart. They could be pushed closer together again by two methods - minimum age (already in place but could be raised) and term limits. I would like to see a consecutive term limit of 2 terms for all offices. This would allow politicians to server two terms, and then require them to take a least one term off. If the retirement plan was also done away with it would force politicains into the real world between elected terms.
Here's the link to the NY Times article (which in a week will be inaccessible to non-subscribers).
Here's a more permanent link (via the Economist's View blog)to most of the article with some bits edited out:
And and excerpt:
Now, I'm a peak oiler, so I think that rise is coming anyway. Might as well prepare for it. But Joe Sixpack is not gonna go for this. Remember the Bush campaign ads that mocked Kerry for once considering a $0.50 a gallon tax?
There is more discussion of gas taxes in the January 27th post - Bush to GM and Ford: Build a Better Car.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/1/26/15350/1301
My first reaction was to agree it's a good plan, then I got to thinking how it would be attacked. The argument against the plan would go like this: "Us hard working Americans have to pay this onerous new tax and then the government is going to turn around and give that money to welfare queens!"
I guess the plan described in the Times article works around that (give the refund via reduced payroll taxes). You don't have to be a "driver" to get the refund. (And how would you define that, anyway?) But homeless people and "welfare queens" (if they exist) wouldn't get a cash bonanza each christmas to party with.
On the other hand I guess the AARP would be all bent out of shape about it.
However it must be noted that if the reasons for implementing a serious gas-tax scheme are as serious as we believe, should be really be "not risking" it because of some unavoidable regressive features?
Britain and other parts of the world have taxes amounting to 75% of the retail price. Do we ever hear about regression there? Society will adapt to the side effects of these measures that aid it.
Then there would be real motivation to drive less because by doing so you save more than otherwise.
As for today, the price signals aren't strong or consistent enough to lead to policy change. A price of $100/barrel, sustained for several months, would surely goose the system into motion. Where to, of course, is another question entirely.
And, since I mentioned it, why have I heard absolutely nothing in the press or on my travels on the web, including here (!), about bringing the 55MPH speed limit back? Exploring that in the context of our political structures might put some flesh on the rather abstract bones of this thread.
So why is it that 55mph isn't on the radar?
After all, it would not require a new tax, and it even would be consistent with 'the culture of life' insofar as it might reduce traffic fatalities as a bonus benefit.
Your example suggests a little back of the envelope math (taking many liberties of course, but it's a start)
assume: you previously got 20mpg, now you get 25mpg. That's a 25% increase in efficiency.* Further assume that 50% of miles traveled is >55mph. Then, if a new 55mph limit were universally enforced, that would result in an increased AFE of something like 12%. With 70% of consumption going for vehicular transportation, that would lead to more than an 8% decline in total oil consumption, ceteris paribus, of course. Even with much more pessimistic assumptions, we're still looking at a 5% possible reduction in consumption.
That ain't chump change. And it's 'free'!
* that 25% increase in efficiency is consistent with some studies on the topic.
I disagree with this whole argument but on the surface it sounds logical.
Seriously, when I am Emperor we go back to a variation of World War II gasoline rationing:
- 35 m.p.h. speed limit, except for buses and emergency vehicles, which could go as fast as they like. Thus we get people out of cars and onto streetcars and buses.
- marketable gas coupons for rationing, which poorer people could sell to richer ones. Everybody with a driver's licence gets 10 gallons per week at the modest price of 5 per gallon. You want more coupons, go to the places where poor people live and buy theirs. Thus we kill two birds with one stone: Income redistribution and shifting the whole demand curve down and to the left.
Now would this work? Yes. How much chance is there of it being put into effect before TSHTF? About one-fourth as much as a snowball in hell has to last for half an hour.I expect most Americans who were around then look back at the efficiency measures of the 70s as some sort of communist plot to deprive us of our rights. That's where "conservation" became a concept to sneer at. Americans have grown up before and after the 70s with a culture of speed and power. Even the hybrids are starting to advertise their acceleration and peak horsepower.
Oil CEO and uterenonnumera are right, prices aren't high enough to really change behavior at this point. When they do get that high, and don't appear to be headed back down soon, things will start to change.
Anyone want to recommend a good book on the 70s? What kind of political changes happened in the 70s that allowed those efficiency changes to take place?
One of my coworkers who is old enough to remember the '70s told me that he used to camp out all night to get gas. He was working as a cable installer, so he had to have gas. He'd park his car in front of the pumps at about 10:30pm and go to sleep. He'd wake up when the gas station opened at 7 or 8am and fill his tank. There would be a line stretching blocks behind him by then.
The 55 MPH speed limit was a non-factor as roughly the same number of people actually drove 55 then as do today. Traffic courts did a robust business, but in many states the cops were many times fairly indifferent toward enforcement. I think they would have been totally indifferent, but the Feds threatened withholding of highway funds unless they reported some magic number of speeding citations. They certainly didn't have to work very hard for them.
One more thing, I'm pretty sure that most of the automobile fuel consumption in the US actually occurs in urban zones where the speed limit is already at or below 55 and the actual average speed is often below 35.
You want fuel conservation, get the damn government, fed and local, to levy some kind of sin tax on SUVs and require the Japanese and Europeans (Oh and looking to the future, Chinese while we're at it) to include a large percentage of small diesel cars and pickups in their import quotas.
About oil and efficiency, I don't know of any specifically on the subject. Alot of authors give these topics decent treatment. Simmons' 'Twilight' discusses some myths associated with the demand thing.
Keith Bradsher's 'High and Mighty' about the evolution of SUV's is very good, although I forget how much he gets into the 70's gas issue. You reminded me to check.
I really like this new book by Tertzakian - 'A Thousand Barrels a Day.' I know he discusses the subject, but haven't read enough to give a full appraisal.
Also SUVs roll over with great regularity--nowhere near as safe as my old Bohemuth.
Anyway the big point is this: Write your laws with care, or they will bite you. Plato, BTW, clearly knew and expressed this in his final work, THE LAWS, in which he stated the biggest problem is how to keep political pressure from changing and corrupting excellent and wise old laws.
Those old Greeks stole all our good ideas before we even got there.
There was a bit more to it than that.
Some years back (1963, I think) there was a trade spat between Europe and the U.S that somehow involved chickens. The US ended up enacting a retaliatory tariff on imported trucks of 25% (google "chicken tariff truck" for links to this). The intended target at the time was Volkswagen.
All these years later, the tariff still exists, but the point is that by creating the SUV craze in the US, the US automakers created a situation where they had a natural immunity to foreign competition. Some automakers have figured out ways around it (building them in the U.S. is probably one of the ways around it).
What did scare the hell out of Detroit was the swarm of compact pickups swimming ashore from Japan in the 80s. They were very threatening to the market for F-150s, Silverados and Rams. Why did it matter? For many years the Ford F-150 had been the biggest selling vehicle in the US and they were cheap to build. What to do? Well, go running to your Uncle Sam's House and whine a lot, of course. This was well covered in the automotive press at the time. Uncle, of course, looks after his own and so a barrier was erected, making it harder for those little trucks to get ashore.
Now for how this caused the SUV. Included in the category of pickup trucks were versions that extended the cabin over the cargo area with some form of rear seating. Both Detroit and Japan built these and they were also affected by the barrier. But, there was a loophole (there is always a loophole). Fully enclosed pickup trucks with four doors were , wait for it, NOT pickup trucks. Well, everything has to be something and since they weren't pickup trucks and they certainly didn't want to be station wagons it was time to consult the oracle, of Mad Av that is. The oracle knew that what is near and dear to the hearts of soccer moms and Joe Sixpacks everywhere are sports and utility. Once the word got out that these TRUCKS were actually SUVs, well, you weren't sh*t if you didn't have one.
That point is much lower for a high, boxy vehicle such as a truck or SUV. They start hitting the wall at 40 mph.
Imagine a 55 mph speed limit for cars, but 40 mph for trucks or SUVs.
Seriously, you cosmopolitans would be amazed at perceptions and beliefs up in Bush country. My house is the ONLY one that did not have a Bush sign on it on my road. There are about 10,000 people who live within the city limits of my town. I saw exactly 2 Kerry signs and many hundreds of Bush/Cheney signs, possibly more than a thousand. All my neighbors are nice people, but perhaps you can see why for my well being and getting along with them it is best that the identity and location of Don Sailorman be left a bit foggy.
Now given time, I hope to arrange another situation (which will surely involve both sacrifices and benefits), and I'm working on that all the time. But it won't happen overnight. You simply cannot change a society and its infrastructure instantly.
Coulda shoulda woulda - how is this helpful?
Someone suggested up or down thread - after 300 comments I find it hard to keep track - that the reduced speed limit in the 70s had no effect on speeds. On the contrary, people then as now drove about 10 mph above the speed limit, and the reduction in fatalities is so well documented that I won't bother to find a source.
Specifically to your points:
Democracy in America is an illusion.
That said, the electoral college has some advantages. Specifically, it prevents "the tyranny of the majority." In the U.S., a minority that cares strongly about something can override a majority that doesn't. Which is probably how is should be. In any case, we probably have a better chance of making peak oil a serious political issue under the electoral college than we would in a straight vote.
In fact, I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately. It's my view that what we're seeing today are some of the most obvious defects of democracy, and the only way to cure them is to go further - to abandon the divisiveness of political parties and reach for consensus on all important issues. Without political parties to galvanize passions and shape world-views, wouldn't it be clearer what exactly reality and truth were telling us about the world? Yes, about limits on oil for one thing. And on global warming, where the scientific consensus is very strong. Far too many people feel some sort of loyalty to their party and somehow think that, because they're a good Republican they have to question the facts of evolution or the harmfulness of second-hand smoke, or conversely a good Democrat and have to favor sex, drugs and rock and roll...
Where there's no clear consensus obvious from the facts of the matter, we leave it, we agree to disagree, or we agree to designate some process to arbitrate if decisions are needed on the matter now. Where there is clear consensus, with less than, say, 5 or 10% of people objecting, we move ahead on the matter.
In a sense, all systems of government have to operate with a sense of consensus at the base: our implicit consent in the US is the process enshrined in our constitution, which includes procedures for its own modification that themselves require a supermajority in agreement. But it seems to me that with modern information technology there should be a way to establish consensus on more detailed issues as well. We do use the consensus approach in jury trials, where you usually need unanimous agreement on decisions from all twelve jurors. Why not extend the idea more broadly?
But I don't know of any detailed proposal for such a system of government at this point...
Well, half of us do. The rest are strongly opposed. :-)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11376553/
Can you imagine Americans turning off their cars at red lights?
Roosevelt did what he could to prepare the US for the repeat of the Great War he saw coming, but even he, with all his power, could not tell the public we would go to war. That had to wait until we were attacked, and the Japanese conveniently obliged.
Gore's great mistake was to tell the public his plans regarding energy before being elected. These things take a certain amount of stealth. Bush was much smarter, never mentioning his Iraqi intentions until after being sworn in...
The size of the House was adjusted after every Decennial census through 1910. Since then, it has been static. This has lead to entrenched Representatives and egregious gerrymandering.
Two things should be done: (1) The size of the House should be, at least, tripled. (2) House districts should be required to be as geographically compact as is consistent with one person/one vote. (Here in Iowa, House districts cannot cross county lines.) Perhaps we should move to House members being elected at-large rather than in districts or some combination of district/at-large representation, e.g., large compact districts electing 5 or 7 Representatives at-large.
Energy depletion is our world's receding hairline. Instead of aging gracefully, Uncle Sam has left the comb-over stage and is now trying to fashion a convincing toupee by plucking what it can from other countries. A strong wind dislodged that hairpiece last summer, so maybe they'll opt for nuclear implants or graft something from ANWR.
I recently ask a college class, "What is peak oil?" and "Has the US oil production peaked yet?" Answers: a unanamous "don't know" on the 1st one, and a majority "not yet" on the second one.
So, folks, the degree of ignorance about the real problem is ENORMOUS. So naturally our elected reps. don't do anything. I'd bet if you asked all of them the same questions as above, many would get it wrong or not know.
Everyone knows there's a problem with the price of oil, but nearly everyone thinks it's because of temporary problems of weather or middle east politics. The actual concept of PO will probably not be well understood in this country until it is very clearly in the rear view mirror.
Katrina alone would have been sufficient to take any other gov't down if we had anything approaching a democracy. Nixon? Clinton? What were they impeached for? These guys are cemented into office. They have dumped zillions into the pockets of the top 1/100... of the population. And finally, the Pentagon has plans stretching far into the future, more war, the long war they now call it. How can they make plans like that if we are operating on a 4 year election cycle?
All in all, a very wide gap has arisen between what we have on paper and what we have in reality here in the US. There is at least one credentialled peak oiler who sees some of these things pretty clearly -- Colin Campbell. Look for the chapter on 9-11 in his OIL CRISIS.
Underlying all this, aside from the Pentagon, is an ever greater concentration of capital and corporate power. Show me a bill written recently that was not written by or to the specs of one or another corporate interest. The Senate and Congress have been almost totally corrupted by these interests.
There is undoubtely butting of heads at the top of the heap, but it has precious little to do with democracy. I don't deny that democracy still lives at the lower and local levels--I experience it and see it.
To the particular point, facing up to what is required to deal with peak rationally is profoundly inimical to the controlling interests. It might seem obvious to us that militarily subjugating the rest of the world is not a long term solution and therefore it is obvious to the guys in charge. But it was obvious that Hitler could not ultimately succeed either---but that didn't stop him from trying.
An extreme view of things, yes. And perhaps TOD is not the right place to argue it, because the topic that TOD does pursue, and pursues well, is immensely important no matter where one falls in the political spectrum.
End of tirade.
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"Ach, du lieber! Yo soy Adolph Hitler reincarnated from my temporary indisposition, and America can be saved! But first we must seek out and destroy our TRUE ENEMIES, the belly worms that drain our strength, the unAmericans, the venom in our blood the [ . . . got in trouble for listing obvious candidates a couple of weeks ago so fill in your own canditates . . .] and once we have our strength back we achieve our Manifest Destiny. The Manifest Destiny party sees annexation of Canada and Mexico for their useful fuels as obvious and of benefit to all! Prosperity is at hand! And with the burning of the Reichstag, excuse me, the Capitol, we see how those Democrats and Republicans plot against the true American, the patriot."
Hail to the Leader!
Hail to the Leader!
Hail to Victory!
In the case of 9-11, there can be no question of a conspiracy. The only question is: whose? 19 guys with boxcutters organized by a guy in a cave, all willing to commit suicide -- for what reason exactly? -- who are not worried about infiltration, who have no trouble getting into the country, no trouble getting trained at our air schools, no trouble getting into the airports, no trouble hijacking the planes with only boxcutters, no trouble taking control of the planes, no trouble flying two of them from Boston to NY without assistance from the aircontrollers, no trouble hitting their targets, no trouble hitting the Pentagon AFTER the twin towers are hit. Not only is the Pentagon undefended, it is unsurveilled! Ask to see the photographs of the plane going into it!
Now of course the other conspiracy theory says that guys who planned on making war actually did something that gave them a pretext to do so -- 9-11 has been the excuse for everything. What a silly theory! They would never think of that, would they? Nope, they'd just sit around waiting for good luck.
Believe me, this is but the teeniest, teeniest fraction of what could be said. The physics of the collapse is totally, totally impossible other than thru demolition. Indeed, if anyone needs a million dollars, prove otherwise. That's what Jimmy Walters is offering to anyone who can do so.
David Ray Griffin, a theologian, does the best job of making the case in his books and lectures.
BTW, there are a lot of 9-11 truthers, who think peak oil is a conspiracy of the oil companies and gov't. I tell them the same thing -- you have to look at the facts and the whole picture. Lay aside what you want to believe.
One point of several.
Heat steel and it's tensile strength goes down dramatically. Twin Towers had some structural damage to some of the steel, mechanical damage to the insulation sprayed on the steel (which only slows down the process of heating & weakening) and a raging, contained fire fueled by tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel. Think blast furnance.
Wheres my million dollars ?
That reward has as much credability as the rest.
Oh, and Osama was not in a cave pre9-11. He was a semi sovereigb state within a sovereign state. His son married the daughter of the Head of State to seal his exalted position within Afghani society.
One of the greatest problems our Democracy faces is insufficient knowledge among those who carry on Democracy's debates.
(Forgive them father, for they know not about the Freak Peak Oil thing.)
I come not to fault AlanFromBigE cause I'm no more knowledgeable or smarter than he. However, ---(do you sense a eulogy of Brutus by Mark Anthony coming on?)-- it appears that Alan has not been informed about WTC7 and the controversy surrounding why that building went down. We may never know. I for one, am on the 50-50 fence. Maybe it went down due to planted demolition, maybe it went down due to ground vibrations (the local earthquake that was created by the bigger towers collapsing). At this point I have insufficient information to even intelligently debate the issue.
However, as to the existence of organized groups who come up with clever schemes for altering the course of our mentality manipulated herds, have you not heard of the think tanks?
Who are these people? What do they do all day? Who pays them and why? I hope all their mixed messages got through enough to make your head to spin and go off balance. This is no time to be sure footed about anything.
It wouldn't surprise me if the neocons orchestrated 9-11 and told W to sit in a classroom until it was over, but the WTC 7 thing isn't very convincing. The Pentagon stuff is a lot harder to ignore.
Center for Media and Democracy
http://www.prwatch.org/spin
By the authors of amongst other books:
Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future
And your 'theory' explains the collapse of WTC7 exactly how?
The question was "about collapse: which brings to mind WTC 1 & 2 fro well over 99% of the public. My facts (and I stated verifable, scientific facts), explain the collapse of WTC ! & @. I neither know or care and will not waste time considering the fate of an auxilary building in the complex. Better things to do with my time. Wish I had not wasted time responding as I hit "post".
When asked to explain how jet fuel brings down WTC7, you state "you will not waste your time".
Why not just come out and say "I got nothing" if you have to respond.
Because really, you have got nothing. Other than hand waving. And showing that you are part of the 99%.
The interaction of jet fuel and the weakening of the structural steel certianly was a critical factor in their collapse. I looked at the forensic engineering when it came out and was quite convinced.
I simply do not care, and neither does anyone else, why WTC 7 collapsed because it makes no difference why it collapsed except to structural engineers. I am sure that there is a good structural reason for this meaningless building collapse. It was certainly not a conspriacy since no one knows aor cares except speciality engineers. Not a topic worthy of time or consideration.
Niether do I particularly care about the particulars of the damage to the PATH station (which did impact the NYC economy).
BTW, Why did the Coliseum Theater fire do so much damage ?
That question is more imprtant to me than WTC 7.
WTC 7 matters to the insurance company, to the people who had pending investigations or business with:
Salomon Smith Barney
Provident Financial Management,
American Express Bank International,
U.S. Secret Service,
Standard Chartered Bank,
Securities & Exchange Commission,
United States Equal Opportunity Commission,
NAIC Securities,
ITT Hartford Insurance Group,
First State Management Group, Inc,
Federal Home Loan Bank,
Internal Revenue Service Regional Council (for how could they be proven innocent with the evidence destroyed)
The people who have to reconstruct whatever records that were destroyed must care bout the extra work. People who had pending trades must care.
I am sure that there is a good structural reason for this meaningless building collapse.
And yet you can't be bothered to ponder WHY. Huh.
It was certainly not a conspriacy
Yea, the events of Sept 11th 2001 were NOT a conspiracy. In fact, the 19 hijackers were NOT involved in a conspiracy - they were just a group of guys who never met before, all showed up on planes with box cutters, and just all had a hankering to take over a plane, then due to poor piolting, flew 'em into buildings or corn fields.
since no one knows aor cares except speciality engineers. Not a topic worthy of time or consideration.
Oh, wait. Its not a conspiracy because "no one knows aor cares"?
Their targets were WTC 1 % 2, the two that mattered. WTC 7 was just happenstance collateral damage (an extra blessing from Allah).
And there was no conspiracy on the ground, thinking that "Damn, if we don't knock down WTC 7 we will NEVER get the Patriot Act passed ! The Twin Towers and the Pentagon are just NOT enough to stir public opinion unfortunately :-("
eric blair,
No need to get emotional. I think you scored big time just with the above example of the 19 accidental tourists. Of course there was a conspiracy. We are only arguing about how big and wide spread it was.
Nonetheless, we are flying somewhat off topic from the Peak Oil center of this blog (TOD).
An interesting "conspiracy theory" question on the Peak Oil front is whether Daniel Yergin of CERA, John Tierny of New York Times and/or other such "cornucopians" get paid and prodded by some conspiratorial power group to keep the sheeple convinved that there is no oil problem?
What say you?
Your outlandish accusations cannot be allowed to pass unnoted. Were you in the US in 2001? Do you remember what was going on? Everyone was getting "rich" from the tech boom. The Cold War was over. Indeed, "history" was over. We were in a "new economy". Some people knew we were in danger, but most people didn't want to hear it, including people with responsible positions in the FBI.
Conspiracy theorists suffer from a lack of understanding or a willingness to accept that sometimes, single individuals or small groups can destroy things much larger than themselves. These theorists have such fear and awe of the "powers that be" that they can't accept that their phantom omniscients can be destroyed by mere flesh-and-blood individuals, and so they fabricate elaborate stories to compensate.
So, an airplane didn't hit the Pentagon, eh? And your proof is what, that there isn't a picture of it happening at that very instant (only the explosion, not the plane, traveling and hundreds of miles an hour?). Excuse me, but reality takes place outside of the television set, and not every event in the world gets captured on a camera the moment it happens. Are you saying that all of the passengers killed on the plane that hit the Pentagon didn't exist? That there is no record that those people ever lived in the first place? Are you insane?
I have worked in large bureaucratic organizations, and I can tell you that they are no stronger than the people who run them. To try to accuse people in our government of enabling the 9/11 attacks is outrageous. Why can't you just accept that Osama Bin Laden caught us with our pants down, and killed several friends of mine as a result?
To perpetuate this ridiculous conspiracy theory is absurd and insulting to the memory of the dead.
A 757 did not hit the Pentagon.
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/flight77.htm is but one website out of 100's of thousands that host the pictures to prove it.
Furthermore, impact WAS captured on film by Virgina's Dept. of Transportation but you won't ever see the tapes.
THAT my friend, is the ultimate insult to the dead.
Thankfully though, America's Youth are calling BULLS**T!
I suggest you google the movie 'Loose Change'.
Just be prepared to step off into the deep end of the pool with the rest of us when you're done.
While I'm inlined to belive there are many holes in the official story about what happened, and I would like them answered, I do think a 757 hit. There are more than enough other questions though.
I challenge you to watch Loose Change (hosted by Google; look for the 2nd edition) and then go back to the link you provide.
In fact, I challenge ANYONE to watch this movie - a documentary created and produced by American CHILDREN who have NOTHING TO GAIN and EVERYTHING TO LOSE.
Loose Change does a very good job of explaining this.
http://www.alciada.net/dload.php?action=category&id=3
Not watched it yet. Also found this page which comments on some of the photos:
http://www.earth-citizens.net/english.html
For now I would say that I don't know where ultimate responsibilities on this lie. I can't honestly find it within me to believe that (part of) the US administration could be seriously complicit, in some ways I am a naive soul and find the evil that implies incomprehensible and violently sickening. But I am troubled that 9/11 is not as officially portrayed. Ultimately I don't think it really matters, I have a 'hunch' that this US regime has equally nasty skeletons ready to rattle. The last US regime I felt this way about was Nixon's, it's probably just a question of whether they become known before or after this term.
WTC7. Here we know what happened -- if your believe the leaseholder, Larry Silverstein. Google "larry silverstein", "wtc 7", "pulled it", and find the piece from the PBS documentary where he says he and the fire dept decided to "pull it" to prevent further loss of life. Do a little research on this.
Steel. There are (was) 200,000 tons of structural steel in the WTC. The amount of jet fuel was on the order of several hundred thousand gallons. So you're talking a few gallons per ton. Steel is a very good conductor of heat. The girders were all interconnected. All three towers came straight down into their own footprint. This is what demolition experts try to achieve. None toppled this way or that -- all gave way at the same time.
Also, look at the photos again. Notice the matchsticks flying out and dropping some distance from the building. These are huge steel girders. What force ejected them away from the buildings? Notice also that they are falling at the same rate as the buildings--free fall.
Calculate the time free fall would take. (9.2 seconds.) The 9-11 Commission report says it took ten seconds. They weaken their own case -- it took 14 seconds. The steel frame structure delayed free fall by less than 5 seconds? Now picture a string of 110 bowling balls, one per floor, hung vertically in empty space by an invisible wire where the WTC was. No ball is free to move until it is hit by the one above. Let the top one drop, crashing into the one below and so on. This is an abstract model of the pancake theory. You'll get sqrt(2) * 9.2 secs, i.e. 13 seconds for the collapse. If the girders only delay things by 1 second, don't visit NYC.
Why? Why did he say such a thing in the first place? I think it was a bargaining ploy, a shot acoss the bow, negotiating with the gov't over insurance money. The big boys play rough, very rough.
We can discuss the technical issues and possible solutions all we want (and we should continue to do that), but there can be no effective response unless it is on a very large scale. And that will not happen. Yes, people will find ways of using less oil as prices rise, but I believe it will be too little too late. And the government will focus on the military solution, which ultimately does not exist.
Sorry, pessimistic lately.
We are definitely moving toward a much less participatory democracy. It's almost as if Peak Oil awareness is operating subliminally; wherein resource constraints are manifesting themselves as "all are equal, but some more equal than others."
Even the great Classical democracies of Greece & Rome had few true citizens. Regretfully, I belive that is where we're heading
The lying bastards who got us into the Vietnam War? That government?
The totally ineffectual Carter administration?
The arrogant stupidity of the JFK administration that nearly got us into World War Three through huge blunders?
The crook Nixon's Watergate-total-corruption-in-fundraising administration?
I do not mean to defend the indefensible, i.e. the current administration. But surely you cannot be defending the FDR administration that went along with denying votes to Blacks so as to keep the Solid South with the Democrats. Or can you?
The problems we face are deep and structural. We should not be distracted by personalities. Who cares if Cheney was loaded when he shot the old Republican lawyer? Who cares if Bush or Kerry got lower grades at Yale? (Surprise, surprise, Kerry got lower grades. So what?)
I do not have the answers. Currently I'm working toward a clearer definition of Peak Oil, the Big Hairy Problem. There are many intractable sub-problems.
Just as the problem of slavery could not be solved without the Civil War, I very much fear that social conflict of that magnitude is about a 50:50 chance at this point.
TEOTWAWKI is not just a song, not just a metaphor.
There are people out there right now who would love to take over and start shooting liberals. But there aren't enough of them and they can't get the other conservatives to go along and fight for them, so it's over.
We'll have the liberals take over and clean things up. Which is why I'm moving to Australia. If I have to live in a socialist country, I'd rather live there.
Almost all of rural heartland America is pro-Bush and most of them have big dogs, arsenals of firearms, and big pickup trucks with bumper stickers that say (with some variations), "Ted Kennedy's car has killed more people than my gun." Which, of course, is true.
If Bush, Jr, announces that there aren't going to be any more elections, how many of those proBush people are going to be willing to get out of their houses, drive to a metrocoastal area, and carry a gun down to a barricade? Lots. But not enough. He wants to be dictator of how much of America?
Hell, if Bush wants to partition the country between the flyover and the metrocoastal areas, the Democrats would get down on their knees and thank God. He could probably win a referendum on that program. An honest referendum.
Say, Libertarians in the NW, Hispanics in the SW, Blacks in the SE, Liberals in the NE, and Conservative Christian Caucasians in the center.
He's got my vote.
My lament is along the lines of Twilight; that is to say the changing structure of government and the seemingly inexorable dismantling of the separation of powers to which, I would include the fourth estate.
To me, it appears that every other branch of gov't as well as the Press is willingly abrogating its powers to the Executive.
And again, along the line of Twilights comments, I suspect that there is at least a subliminal recognition of the powers that be, that PO and all its contingent difficulties will require a less participatory democracy.
As to your 50:50 chance of a civil war :
Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus during the Civil War. The current administration with the compliance of the other branches of gov't is on its way of doing the same, if it has not already done so.
I can find major flaws in just about every previous administration, but nothing comes close to this one. The pace of degradation is truly breathtaking.
I just forwarded the "Daily Reckoning" posts of Feb 1 & 2 to my daughter dealing with the topic "The Power of the President". The key factor here is EXECUTIVE ORDERS. IMO, these rank as some fairly impressive violations of (at least) the spirit of the Constitution. You may be able to get the trains to run on time, though (see Mussolini).
I'm convinced that the problem stems from the fact that elections and congressional representation have very little to do with the way real power is exercised in the US, circa 2006. So much of corporate, financial, and personal power in this country flows through back channels and totally bypasses the electorate. This process can be easily summed up in one word: corruption.
Members of Congress in the US actually have two sets of constituents: i) the masses whose votes they need, and ii) the powerful interests that are instrumental in putting and keeping them in office. The two often have conflicting interests. Unfortunately, the latter is getting more important, while the former more and more irrelevant.
The current Bush regime actually has a very clear, though unstated, energy policy: militarily dominate the Middle East and other oil-rich areas so as to gain direct or indirect control over future oil production and distribution. Funding is no obstacle for this energy policy, as evidenced by the approximately $300 million spent on our invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the fact that the meter is still spinning.
The only problem, though, is that this energy policy has so far been a complete failure. That inconvenient little fact will not deter these people, so we can expect more war in the Middle East without getting any additional oil for the effort. This is the very essence of folly.
How can anyone possibly think that there will be a major restructuring of our energy infrastructure as long as we are spending something like $1.5 billion per week on a perpetual military adventure?
A good example of this is the debate that is going on Slashdot right now.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/16/0251210
Not very many of their topics go past the 800 post mark lately, and this one will go past the 1,000 mark before it goes into the archive section.
Unless a vast majority of the populace understands peak oil while knowing that economics, technology, and down right faith will not provide the answer. Then the politicians will continue to ignore it publicly while choosing the course that benefits them privately. While corporations deceive the public with bad solutions like corn based ethanol, which of course allows them to reap more profits at the expence of people desorying valuable farmland for feeding their cars.
My depression was cured by finding that fixing this system does not have to be that hard. A lot of it is due to the way our elections are held: Winner-takes-all. This system discourages voting for alternative parties, eliminates competition through gerrymandering, and gives voters less incentive since they feel they are voting for the lesser of two evils.
The fix is to make the elections more competitive. More competition means politicians more responsive to the public, and public energized to vote because their choice matters. Making elections more competitive involves two tweaks to the voting process:
- proportional representation voting: you rank the candidates. If your top choice does not make it, your vote switches to the next one. This allows voters to express prefecence for minority parties without feeling they've thrown out their vote.
- multi-member districts (for House of Representatives, and on a local level). Instead of splitting state into tiny districts, which invites gerrymandering, create superdistricts with multiple members (ex 5). Everyone votes for 5 candidates, and top 5 go to Washington.
If you are interested in learning more about this, visit http://www.fairvote.org/. They are an advocacy group for election reform.What I like about this approach is that it is clean. Clean appeals to my engineering side. Campaign finance reform, appointments of independent panels for redistricting, always felt like band-aids on a system that is fundamentally broken. The election reform is about giving us more choices, and Americans love choice as Starbucks menu demonstrates.
An interesting innovation (installed by our 4 term governor now sleeping in orange) is our open primary fro all state-eide & national offices. Everybody in for primary. If no one gets 40%, then run-off between top two (regardless of their total %).
A modest improvement, it has brought a higher % of reformers to office than before.
Restated:
An interesting innovation (installed by our 4 term governor now sleeping in orange) is our open primary for all state-wide & national offices. Everybody in for the primary. If no one gets 50%, then a run-off between top two (regardless of their total %).
Especially here in the U.S., we rely very much on private enterprise to deal with situations. Peak Oil is not the government's responsibility! They aren't in charge of oil production, distribution or consumption. All that work was done by private individuals trying to make some money. The government took its cut and imposed some regulations, but for the most part, U.S. energy policy is set by private individuals deciding how much they will spend on various things, not by George Bush.
It's one thing to say, Peak Oil is here and the government is ignoring it. You can come up with all kinds of reasons and explanations, in terms of political interests and even conspiracy theories. But really the problem is worse than this. It's not just the government which is ignoring Peak Oil. It's private individuals as well. It's the oil industry. It's the investment community. It's the futures market.
Nobody believes in Peak Oil! Almost nobody, anyway. It's not like there's this groundswell of informed opinion that the government is ignoring. "Peak Oil Now" is still very much a minority view. The great number of people who really set our oil policy, by deciding what to buy and sell, don't believe in it. This is very clear by their actions and by market prices.
You can't effectively analyze the government's response (or lack of it) to Peak Oil without accepting the reality that mainstream academic and financial opinion is that we are not facing an imminent peak. This is what the government's experts are telling it, and it is what is reflected by the financial markets. The truth is that people on this site are far from society's consensus view on this issue. Maybe you'll turn out to be right, but the case has not been made well enough yet to persuade society as a whole.
Then they should stop pretending responsibility, with DOT rules, EPA fuel economy estimates, CAFE standards, ethanol subsidies, hydrogen research (an exhaustive list would continue for some time).
The central dsyfunction we have is the tension between two incompatible systems of belief:
In case it wasn't clear, I believe that we would not have a cellulosic ethanol program if the government did not believe in a close approximation of Peak Oil.
And all this time I thought the ethanol program was to reduce CO2 and hence global warming!
</sarcasm>
Well, I think the peak oil community as a whole and TOD have made the case very well. They've certainly heard the message in Sweden. Interesting however that you speak of "society's consensus view". That was the very thing on my mind when I read PG's post. Presumably, you are talking about the American view.
As Chomsky and others have pointed out, consensus opinion is manufactured in the US by a substantial PR (advertising &marketing) industry. Policies (like invading Iraq) are sold like toothpaste. 50% of Americans still believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was actively aiding Al-Qaeda. Those numbers are not as high as they used to be as the truth has come to light, but the necessary consent was manufactured back in 2002 and 2003 in the lead up to the war. Fox News was instrumental in creating that consensus reality but there were many, many others both inside and outside the government. The only independent (not-corporate owned) media left to us is the internet. Thank god for this website!
Now, how does this relate to Peak Oil? Taking the necessary steps to change the way we live to accomodate the energy crisis goes against the money-making interests of virtually every powerful govermental or corporate/media interest in this country. Not to point out the obvious, but the elites are making money in the system as it currently exists. Why would they want to upset the apple cart? It is obvious that the Bush people have edited reports on climate change. The story that has not emerged is that they have probably "influenced" the predictions of the EIA.
Now, some members of the US elite have actually come out and told the truth. T. Boone Pickens comes to mind. Now, what's really interesting about this is that Bush comes out and says we're "addicted to oil", mentions ethanol from corn and just at about the same time we get this nonsense
Yesterday, the Denver Post reported Plug pulled on renewable energy gurus
So, what's going on? The illusion is being manufactured that the powers that be are working on the energy crisis. Obviously, they are not but weapons of mass destruction were an illusion too.So, when you refer to society's consensus view, I'm having a bit of trouble with that.
Good response and post. I as hybrid owner and child of the first energy crunch of the 1970's am amazed at what people believe.
Much of what is written in the MSM is flat out wrong. GM spent more than 1 calender year trying to trash the Toyota hybrid technology when the 2004 Prius was launched. GM claimed the prius didn't get as good as mpg as advertised (no car does, but the Prius is still very high). That the extra cost of hybrids can't be made up by consuming less gas (many prius owners show this is incorrect). The technology is not robust and will fail more often than conventional power plants (The Prius has has fewer repairs and recalls than the average car). Finally GM said that having 2 engines just can't be more efficient than one, it is not logical (the electric system captures and stores momentum in the batteries so it is much more efficient than conventional). Many people to this day still believe GM's propaganda. All of the messages from GM were put out solely to maintain market share and not have people go buy Toyotas. They were not factual. GM couldn't compete because they had no hybrids. Their only recourse was to say all hybrids are bad.
Likewise much talk about energy efficiency, alternative energy and holistic approaches to energy consumption are being drowned out by opposing viewpoints which are often incorrect. This makes it a continuous uphill battle to bring change to the American public even when this change would benefit the consumer. Preventing experts, particularly government funded experts, from contributing to alternative energy approaches is the easiest way to maintain the status quo.
We saw this approach in the Global Warming debate. We see it now in the peak oil debate. Deny the opposing viewpoint air time or legitimacy.
If only one side of the debate is continuously put in front of the American public, that will be the only one that has high public backing in any poll. Public opinion is useless as a foundation of policy if that opinion is uninformed.
To quote from the Bloom County comic strip "Just because a million people do a stupid thing, doesn't mean it isn't a stupid thing".
Now, there is uncertainty about what will happen going forward. One of several possibilities might obtain within the near future region that our discount functions sample: A) supply might resume increasing, B) it might continue flat, or C) it might start to decrease. At this point, no-one knows for sure.
Under each of those hypothetical future scenarios, what would you expect oil prices to do?
I think what you meant was that the suppply curve for oil has tended to shift downward and to the left--a whole different concept from "flattening" of the curve.
If only there were some convenient and easy way to sketch a whole bunch of graphs (properly labelled of course), there could be much clearer explanations and less ambiguity and confusion on these posts.
Unfortunately I do not know how to do this. And even if I did, it is (alas) probably only the economists who would "get it."